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16. Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates
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16 Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates Diana Brydon What are we doing when we express our concerns about immigration and foreignness through the bodies of women? – Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner The epigraph to this paper asks a question that resonates throughout most discussions of globalization and culture. It assumed one of its many manifestations in the media controversy I am calling the Hérouxville debates. In January 2007, a small town in Québec posted a declaration of “norms” for immigrants on the town website as its contribution to an ongoing controversy in the province regarding the accommodation of religious and cultural minorities. This act became a media event that in Canadian terms may be seen not only as comparable to the controversies linked to the Danish cartoons or French debates about the status of the veil, but also as a differentlyinflected contribution to them. My argument in this paper is that what happened in Hérouxville and the series of actions it prompted need to be read within translocal terms that recognize the complex ways in which stereotypes circulating globally are co-produced through multiple, very different locations. To read the declaration as expressing small town, rural Québec’s nostalgia for a simpler and more homogeneous past, or to interpret the ensuing debates as merely another sign of Québec’s distinctiveness 253 within the Canadian mosaic, as many of the early commentaries did, is to miss much of what can be learned from this incident. In analysing what he terms “an unprecedented public ‘religious’ debate that emerged in late-1990 Sri Lanka about questions of otherness and minority rights vis-à-vis the secular state and its national identity,” Ananda Abeysekara argues that “the virtues of thinking of the relevance of this debate to democracy is that it demonstrates not only the poverty of the existing theories about religions and public space but also the aporetic limits of the postcolonial politics within which we continue to conceptualize the question of otherness today” (167). The same could be said of the Hérouxville controversy. In forcing us to “rethink the ethics of engagement” and “to rework their relations to the diversity of ethical sources that mark a pluralist culture” (Connolly qtd. in Abeysekara 167; emphasis in original), this debate marks a fitting conclusion to a book that has sought to shift consideration of crosstalk toward revised understanding of the frictions they generate. While the public spheres of this book’s engagements are multiple, this chapter takes up the challenge articulated by Abeysekara of “recasting some fundamental presumptions that govern modern democratic theory about religion and its relation to public space” (168). As none of the inhabitants of Hérouxville were recent immigrants, many commentators wondered about the motivation behind this act. I argue here that as a local response to provincial, national, and global events, perceived through the town’s understanding of national pressures promoting multiculturalism, the Hérouxville norms and the media storm they unleashed demonstrate how translocality works in global times. In posting its code, the town saw itself as participating in contemporary debates involving local, national, and global consequences. In many ways, the code demands to be read as a proclamation of the townspeople’s own hard-won modernity and their liberation from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the Duplessis era.1 While many of the town’s critics saw their actions as parochial, I argue they saw themselves acting as (Québec) national citizens with global responsibilities . While expressing pride in its Québécois heritage, the town saw itself as shaping the future and setting the terms for its encounters with the world—and not as looking backward to simpler times. To make such an argument is not to endorse the rhetoric of the code, which in the context of its time and place was undeniably incendiary, but to express caution about too quick an embrace of either local or global citizenship as a solution to the world’s problems. It raises questions about the limits of democratic practices, including current attempts to deal with majority 254 SPACE, PLACE, AND CIRCULATION [18.205.114.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:23 GMT) and minority cultures within a democratic state and to manage its borders. This series of events presents a paradigmatic instance of crosstalk as we have been elaborating it throughout this volume. Hérouxville became a zone of friction in which many people found...